The chicken injury

I have a dodgy sacrum.

Back when I was a crazy chicken lady, two of my chicks were pecking on the deck when a storm hit. I scooped up a chick in each hand, ran into the house and slipped on the wet floor.

What happened next is known in physio circles as a “splits injury” but was dubbed the “chicken injury” in our household.

It was one of those god dammit moments when you realise you have compromised your twilight years – I felt my lower back “go” and knew there would be a forever price to pay.

I put a second nail in my lower back coffin a few years later when I added a “bush turkey injury” to my avian-related medical emergency list.

Our former family home had a huge five metre by 25 metre strip of concrete along the back fence – a creek that had been channeled into a pipe – and a local bush turkey decided he wanted to build a nest on it.

Every morning he’d build a large mound, using every bit of mulch and wood chip he could claw from our garden.

Every morning my furious husband would storm out and rake it all away.

While my husband was at work, the bush turkey would claw it all back onto the concrete again.

My husband would get home from work, storm out and rake it all away again.

My husband already felt fairly ambivalent towards me at that juncture in our crumbling marriage and the turkey mound pushed his antipathy up a notch.

One day I decided to clear the second mound away myself to try and restore marital harmony. I piled it into the green bin and wheeled it over to the garden bed, then got bored with shovelling it all back out again and decided to bend down and flip the green bin instead.

Well, that was a really crap idea because I did my back in and had to call my permanently angry husband and ask him to rescue me.

He found an after-hours physio, raced to skipping training to collect the youngest, ran up the back of another skipping mum’s car in his haste to get home to collect me …

Later, when our marriage finally expired, told me it was one of the few moments towards the end that he felt close to me and needed.

Sad.

Anyways …. my chicken injury has become my old age barometer. It taunts me whenever I sit down on hard surfaces for too long. I groan and struggle to straighten myself from a bent to upright position again.

It’s also proving to be problematic when I give myself DIY Brazilian waxes.

This is the moment you should stop reading if you don’t want to hear about my lady bits …

Aaaand, let’s carry on …

Longtime readers of HouseGoesHome may recall that I made the mistake of getting my first Brazilian back in 2015.

That blog post started off like this:

You know how Bruce Willis looks pretty awesome bald … and kinda weird with hair?

I had my first Brazilian wax last week … and … well … I’m no Bruce Willis.

My beautician has this very handy on-line booking service and I was all set to book my regular brow wax, eyelash tint and bikini-line wax when I spotted the Brazilian option.

Ah, what the hell, I thought, you only live once!

Well, I was right about the “hell” part.

Afterwards, as I stood pants-less before the beautician’s mirror, I felt like crying … and not because it hurt so freaking much (I’ve placed it third on my personal agony list behind childbirth and haemorroid surgery recovery).

No, it was because I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.

I’m quite vocal in my distaste for the bald-as-a-badger look and I’d meant to ask for a landing strip of hair to be retained.

But, during the mortification of lying on a table with my legs spread and a paper bikini wedged up my wazoo, I forgot to mention it to the beautician.

Riiiiiiip went my frontal lady garden … and my resolve to retain a modesty curtain of hair was snatched from me on a piece of wax.

My disdain for the bald-as-a-badger look was because I didn’t want to resemble a pre-pubescent girl.

Ha!

I last saw my front bottom 35 years ago and – from hazy memory – it didn’t look anything like THIS.

“Ah,” a friend replied to my distraught text from the salon, “I think it probably (like most things) looked better pre-kids.”

I feel sorry for “it” – poor, pale, decrepit thing.

Four years later, I can no longer afford the luxury of having a beautician wax my bits, so I buy tubs of Nair on special at Woolies and do it myself.

Why do I continue putting myself through that torture?

Well, it turns out that a) when you Brazilian wax for the first time at age 46, your luxuriant titian curls grow back all straggly and grey; and b) you keep thinking you have thrush because the old-person pubes are more coarse, so you buy a whole pharmacy full of Canestan before you realise you’re suffering irritation of the regrowth kind.

I’ll leave c) to your imagination.

And so I find myself stuck on the waxing hamster wheel.

At first I would just sit on the bathroom floor and bend over double to apply the wax, but the chicken/turkey injury is beginning to restrict my flexibility.

During my latest waxing adventure, I used a small hand mirror to save my back.

And that’s how I found myself staring at my vulva/vagina for an hour.

I didn’t enjoy staring at it. I know you’re supposed to love your vulva/vagina because ra-ra feminism, body positivity and all that jazz, but nah. It looked a bit not great.

I dunno what it looked like when I was 25, but at 51 – like the rest of me – it’s no oil painting. And it definitely wouldn’t fit in one of those whacked v-string bikinis that were briefly in fashion over summer.

However, since I’m trapped on that waxing hamster wheel, I’ll be seeing a lot of my vulva/vagina moving forward. The little hand mirror wasn’t quite up to the task, so I need to buy myself a bigger one for next time.

Growing short-sightedness was also an issue. Fortunately, Specsavers sent a message yesterday arvo saying my new spectacles have arrived.

There’s something I never expected to need reading glasses for …

I’m still a bit startled that Judith Lucy wheels a sculpture of her vulva/vagina out on stage every night on tour for everyone to have a gander. Go her, but nah, not me.

(In case you missed Monday’s blog post, DD and I attended her show at the Opera House last Friday.)

Would you put your box in a display box?

Anyways, that’s enough TMI for one morning. Enjoy your vegemite toast.

Song of the day: Luscious Jackson “Naked eye”